


December in Reverse

by Beatingheartanthem



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Body Horror, Canon Era, F/M, Heavy Angst, Horror, Literary FanFiction, Non-Linear Narrative, Unreliable Narrator, canonverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-08-20 09:20:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20225485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatingheartanthem/pseuds/Beatingheartanthem
Summary: "The only way to end one nightmare is by creating a greater one."After an expedition disaster, Eren and Mikasa are stranded in a cabin in the woods where they plan to rest and regain their strength. Fighting nightmare after nightmare, they begin to wonder if these are dreams at all. [Eren/Mikasa] *MANGA SPOILERS to CH 119 (takes place before Eren leaves Paradis (sort of))





	1. Chapter 1

It was December.

Eren was falling.

Through the darkness, he dropped, sourceless, from an unknown height. What had once been snow was now walls of ice-needles. A hard black wind blew, filled with the groans and crashing of the forest. There was no sky. No light. No moon. There was the smear of a Survey Corps cloak, blacker than shadow, falling. Inside it was Eren.

A seal of ice came between him and the bottom of a lake. His body made a dull echoless sound; a gash opened. Into nothing Eren vanished.

Twelve meters tall, a titan came off the bank. An abnormal. Somehow able to move without any light, lumbering in its grotesque oversize toward the water. Its foot rose and came down. Under it, the lake swelled. The ice-surface stretched like a breathing belly, rising, growing larger, inhaling. Tension tore across the ice, thundering with strain. Groaning creaks came to a crescendo. The lake shattered. Ice plates craned up, piercing a black skyless void. Waves trundled onto the banks, crashing, fizzling the snow like it was hot.

Where Eren had vanished, the titan reached its oversized hand.

Twisting in flight, Mikasa jerked her blades out. They connected. The nape flung free. The titan fell, hand mid-reach, dissolving; where it was submerged, the water boiled. Then still flying in the air, Mikasa swung through the centripetal arc, and raising speed and momentum, she unfastened the metal containers at her hips. They plummeted, diminishing under her, vanishing soundlessly.

Climbing higher now, Mikasa fought the weight of the wind, lashed and beaten. Her hair slashed her face. The cloak screamed behind her. As she continued rising, slowing as she came to the highest point, Mikasa reached her hands out, streamline, and dove like an arrow into the water.

When she hit the lake, she did not feel it. She only knew the organs had ceased operating. No longer feeling her own body, she wrestled the lake in her gear. Her hands cut through white-caps, digging under the waves for Eren. She did the action without feeling herself doing it, only seeing it occurring, knowing it must be happening.

She watched her hand fumble into an eddying shadowy form of tendrils. It was the Survey Corps cloak, sinking. She watched her hands seize it up, unable to feel them. Yanking the cloak toward her, she never ceased swimming. Her legs pumped through the bulk and resistance of heavy military boots, fighting to keep her head above the waves. Weight on the other end of the cloak pulled and wrestled. She wrestled back. From out of the deep, she dragged the mass strongly up. Eren’s head nodded to the surface as blue as ivory. He wasn’t breathing. She heaved him up against her side, her legs still pumping, still kicking, fighting to keep her head above the water.

She swam them both to shore.

Wind, water, and ice beat her. Waves crashed over her head. She dropped under and kicked back up, dragging Eren in her arms, using them to pull through waves, spluttering and kicking, fighting all the seething elements of the storm at once. The swimming mechanics were beginning to fail. Not feeling her body, she only saw the slowing down, saw the labor of her arms as they pulled and grappled with the water. The bank was fat with a paunch of snow. She lurched toward it. At last she dragged them both onto land, crunching into a belly of ice.

Without stopping to rest, her arms and legs worked to climb them up the slope. Her fingers scooped through snow, her body soaked to the skin, dragging Eren by the straps of his maneuver gear. Sliding in cold wet slush, her arms and legs worked, climbing them upward, sliding as she climbed, working hard to get them somewhere, anywhere, going nowhere. Her muscles began to slow. Then they began to shut down.

Out of stamina and out of strength, Mikasa rested her head on the ground. Wind cut by her ears. She shut her eyes. The lubrication of her lungs had frozen. Pain knifed through the respiratory system. The top of her lungs tried to breathe. It was shallow breathing, slow breathing. Alongside the bank, his chin tilted slightly upward, Eren lay on his back, not breathing at all.

Mikasa raised her face. “Eren.” She heard her own teeth clattering inside her mouth. “Eren.” She shook him. His head rolled. His mouth was taut and bloodless like hers. For a moment, she thought he might be dead. For a moment, she thought she might be dying too. Then she knew that he wasn’t, and knew that she couldn’t.

Wiped of all feeling, her hands were amputated by the early stages of frostbite. She watched the two hands—they weren’t shaking anymore—as they removed Eren’s Survey Corps cloak. It sloshed aside. Then she concentrated on her fingers and guided them with her eyesight to her mouth; her rubber lips groped around two of them. Three times it failed. On the fourth, a whistle shrieked into the air. She squinted and saw only the black wind with horizontal spears of snow tearing through it. She squinted hard as though the will of her eyes could bring it forward. She searched the line of trees willfully, straining her eyesight until it blurred. Then it came.

Against the blackness, the shadow of a horse began to form.

When the horse reached her, without getting to her feet, Mikasa stretched and fumbled at the bags harnessed across its chest, scrabbling for the coat she knew was inside. She took it out and retreated into the fur. She called Eren again. Lying on the bank, unbreathing, he didn’t respond. Her eyes watered with cold. She shrank into the coat. She sat. Sitting there motionless, her muscles and fluids battled vasoconstriction—she had stopped feeling the cold ten minutes ago. Without her knowing it, her eyes fell asleep. Then she began to dream.

Mikasa dreamed of herself being a little girl. Then she dreamed of Eren being a little boy. Then she didn’t dream anymore.

The hard black wind blew. The whole forest crashed with speed and power. The horse vanished.

With a sound like something solid being broken in half, Eren lurched awake. Water spurt from his mouth and for a long time he vomited as his lungs wrung dry, emptying of the drowning, then emptying of the empty. He gasped and collapsed onto his palms. Vertigo darkened his vision, dimming an already black world. It passed and clarity came on again. Into a shattered December night, he looked out.

When he saw the snow, convulsions seized him; his body realized before his brain could that he was going to die of hypothermia. His muscles shivered to a friction, functioning in a mode higher than that of human ability. He jerked violently, reheating his systems, though he should’ve succumbed a long time ago. He raised on his knees. His eyelashes were frozen. No salt. No saline. Blinking moistureless gritty blinks that stuck the lids to the corneas.

Next to him, sitting up on its own, was the fur coat. His hand extended to open it. With her legs pulled up in a fetal position, Mikasa sat motionless inside, womblike, snow clotted in her hair and clothes, swollen in a bone-marrow freeze, already more than halfway dead.

“Mikasa.” The wind howled over Eren’s voice, blowing it away. He squeezed her shoulder; it didn’t yield, hardened with something like rigor mortis.

Now he tried to stand. The wind beat against him and pushed to keep him down. It leaned mass on him like the palpable hand of a creature of pure rage and power. Eren pushed back, shielding his face, ice barraging his arms, getting to his feet.

The wind fought him even as he stood still. It pressed an unrelenting weight on him. A living roaring force. His thighs held strong against it, snow beating his flesh and muscle, spitting solid pieces of hail and what felt like jagged metal shrapnel, though he knew it wasn’t. His left hand shielded his eyes. Into the other sank his teeth. The sweetish taste of blood poured over his tongue; a paralyzing yellow light broke open.

Eren rose higher, and Mikasa faded, growing smaller, diminishing behind a shroud of wind and snow, cradled rigid in the coat.

Around him trees shriveled and the fight with the wind shrank. The weight came off his body a great deal, his mane whipping ferociously around his head. He seized Mikasa up from the ground. In his fingers, she fit like a doll with all the passive give of a manmade object. His jaws creaked and steamed apart before his hand clapped to his teeth, feeding her into the hot broiling gulf of his titan mouth. Between his skull teeth hissed a burst of steam. His jaws were shut now. He started away.

As he walked, each massive step scorched the snow.

# # #

The cabin in the woods hadn’t been lived in for a long time. It wasn’t inhospitable. And it wasn’t deteriorated either. But it had a strange quality of isolation and untenability. This is where Eren and Mikasa sheltered out the storm.

Inside the cabin was an ignited hearth and the fire exhaled heat throughout the frozen unlived-in home. A slash glinted darkly across Eren’s palm. The injury had opened a pathway to the command over the cryptic titan faculties, and a slow attentive heat pumped from his pores, gradually warming Mikasa’s body. A matted fur coat insulated them both. Wrapped inside it, their chests cupped one another. Her ribcage leaned on his. Mikasa’s cheek lay on his shoulder. In his hand, Eren held the back of her head. Sitting in front of the fire, he watched the light.

Above the hearth mounted over the mantle was the taxidermy of a male deer-head with a ten-point rack of antlers bearing down its dead glass-eyed stare. The black marble eyes could see everything. A kind of insentient omniscience that only the perfectly preserved embalmed dead could access. Quiet crackling filled the house. Eren’s eyes drooped, then they shut altogether. When he opened them again, Mikasa was saying his name. He began to wake up without remembering he’d fallen asleep. 

“You can let go of me,” she said. Eren let go of her. His arms retracted and he leaned back. He averted his eyes. She used her palms to cover herself and twisted around from him and faced the fire, and he drew his legs away. The light bathed her. Her shadow covered him. When Eren’s eyes returned to Mikasa, he saw the harsh curve of her spine with how she was twisted away.

“How long have you been awake?” Eren said.

“Not long,” Mikasa said.

“How are you feeling?”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said. “I’m all right now. Will you hand me that coat?” He opened the fur coat around her shoulders. She closed it up around her throat. The fire sputtered. Sticks burned and disintegrated to ash. The light was tight around them. They were quiet. It was an insulated silence filled with private thinking and as they thought to themselves, they never attempted to disclose what thoughts they had.

“Only the fire was needed,” Mikasa said. “Anything more wasn’t necessary.” The burning flames ate up the wood. It seemed to eat up her voice too, but Eren didn’t have to hear her to know what she had said, knowing too how he would reply without having to think about it. When the house lapsed into silence again with nothing but the flames eating up the wood, he realized he hadn’t replied at all, even though he had thought he knew what to say.

Eren flexed his hand. The gash hissed shut. Mikasa didn’t take her eyes from the fire or say another word about it.

He said: “Thank you for pulling me out of that lake. I’m sorry you had to put yourself in danger because of me.” The fur coat was bunched hard below Mikasa’s chin, as if the head had been set on top of the stiff upright coat like a decoy with just the two pieces, the head and the bear-sheared coat. “I’ll go see if I can find more supplies.”

Eren started off. His footfalls pounded, hollow and hefty, behind her.

“Eren,” Mikasa said. She was still watching the fire, no longer concerned about the clothes that had been removed. The pound of his footfalls ceased. “You saved my life too. Thank you.”

Then the feet began again, hollow and hefty, behind her.

# # #

When Eren returned, he had cans of food, two canteens of water, two bottles of booze, and a large man’s shirt. He threw the shirt to Mikasa. Without dropping the coat, she turned to the fire and lifted her arms, and as she reached up, the interspaces of her rib bones expanded and stood in sharp relief in a haunting anatomical allusion. Eren thought, strangely, of a pin stabbing her through the thorax to the wall on display like a butterfly corpse. A moment: her figure glowed in orange sexless highlight. Then the shirt glided down to contain her. It swam shapelessly.

This was all he could find, Eren said, and he broke open a can of food and fell back onto an old wingback sofa. Without turning around, she heard his weight fully seat itself in the cushions.

Lying stretched out on his side, braced on his elbow, propping his head on his palm, Eren drank the food straight from the can. A pair of linen shorts he’d found was all he wore.

“You shouldn’t eat it raw,” Mikasa said.

“It’s fine,” Eren said.

“There’s a pot,” she said. “I’ll cook it for you.”

“If I wanted it cooked, I’d do it myself.”

Mikasa got up and threw her shadow over the floor. It slithered soundlessly up Eren where he laid on his side. She held out her hand. He saw her opened beckoning fingers. His face was immobile and impenetrable with her shadow overlaying it. Then he kicked his legs off the sofa and swung around and got to his feet and went to take up the pot, which sat in its iron disuse of years, ten years, twenty—it was impossible to tell—by the hearth, expectantly almost. He stuck his hand through the flames and hooked the pot’s arm across the cast iron crane. His immobile head was slanted down. Direct light suffused Eren’s face, and his eyelashes seemed to spark and catch fire with the way the light shifted and translated upon itself.

Seeing her own hand still reached out to where Eren had been lying on the couch, Mikasa lowered it and with her head turned, she looked at him standing in front of the fire.

“We should wait out the storm,” Mikasa said, “and try again in the morning.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I only hope the others aren’t frozen to death.”

“I’m sure Armin thought of something,” she said. “You should rest, Eren, and regain your strength. It’s your titan we’ll have to rely on to get us back home.”

“I know,” he said.

Mikasa’s nostrils perceived a smell before seeing what it was. “Your hand. Don’t you feel it?”

Eren lifted his boiled hand. “It doesn’t make a difference.” In a few seconds, it reverted to the unmarred state, giving off a thin trail of steam, not immune to injury, not even resistant to it, but able to erase the effects after they’d already been thoroughly suffered. Eren took a second food can and a third and squeezed the nonperishables into the cast iron pot. Mikasa went to the fire and crossed her arms. The silence now passing between them was different. It hummed with a kind of concentrated charge.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. Eren’s neckhair picked up the hum, bristling up stiff. He stared down into the pot, sensing that she had something to say. It grinded against her, resisted verbalization. It was her own character getting in the way, he thought. The impairing, self-editing introversion. Not simply introversion. Beyond that.

Eren and Mikasa had known each other since they were children. Like brother and sister, they fed on the vibrations radiating off one another. He knew that she was self-editing, hiding something from him. Knowing this, Eren neither persuaded nor dissuaded her to say whatever it was she wanted to say—they were not like brother and sister in any other way—standing there silently with his arms crossed.

Then Mikasa tried to tell him: “It’s just—At this rate—” but her voice fell again. And this time Eren knew she wouldn’t begin to start over nor would she continue from where she left off. Uninquiring, he let her let it go unsaid, knowing exactly what she wanted to say anyway.

The steady fire heated the iron pot and softened down the nonperishable food into something almost palatable. Finally, Mikasa turned her face across her shoulder and Eren matched her, with the hard soldier arms crossed over the chest, neck turned to look at the other’s eyes, both with impenetrable soldier faces. Eren had grown taller than Mikasa in the past few months, surprising her with an abrupt unforeseen transformation which did not seem to have any distinguishable stages but was realized retroactively at the sudden gruesome emergence of height and width and the unknown all-things that differentiated adolescent boys from adult men; he tilted his chin down a little.

“Is there a ladle?” she said.

“I’ll go see,” he said. And left.

# # #

In sleep, Eren’s face was neither placid nor peaceful nor undisturbed. He bore the implacable fury of a thousand generations, sleeping on his side with his neck as straight as a concrete post across the armrest, his arms folded over his chest. You could tell he was strong and solid, containing no soft flesh from periods of inactivity by the way he maintained a firm shape even when he slept. He seemed larger naked and asleep than he did awake and with clothing on.

Mikasa stirred the cast iron pot. Under the large man’s shirt, her own bare body asserted itself and demanded her chronic awareness. With each second that passed, she knew graphically how exposed she was. On the floor near the fire, their clothes were outspread, rumpled and saturated with lake water. She clamped her arms, crosswise, inclosing herself, trying to feel dressed. Now Eren slept on his back, too long for the wingback sofa. Silently, Mikasa left the fire and began to walk into the bowels of the unlived-in house.

A hallway cut straight backward. It was a dark and doorless path with no discernable end. Just four walls moving in retrograde into darkness. She went down it. As she grew farther away from the living room, the temperature began to drop. Unwarmed by the fire, the atmosphere grew emptier and emptier. Nothing but ribbons of shadow stretched down the rectangle of walls into secretive untenable alcoves. The further she went, the less of herself she became. The less she could remember about where she was and why she was here. The house’s darkness didn’t simply accept her. It adopted her, taking her in the way darkness takes in more darkness, becoming more of itself. She’d been walking for a long time, it seemed. But no doors had appeared.

Gooseflesh prickled Mikasa’s armhair. She gripped her arms, feeling so cold and bare under the man’s shirt. The darkness and the cold swallowed up the last of the diminishing connection she had with the fire and then she stopped. She reverted her neck. Streams of light flowed back toward the living room. She almost turned around. Then forward she continued walking. 

The darkness drew her in. It told her there was more. That there was something to find here. And then from out of the right wall carved a doorway. The door was already opened. She pivoted through and found a bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was not lived in anymore. A neat and made bed buoyed isolated in the middle of a rug. There was a wardrobe, a dresser chest. Jammed against the wall was a piano. A thin skin of dust blanketed the keys. On her bare feet, she went to it.

She saw her finger uncurl and extend. Her touch left a pristine undusted oval on the key; a note rang out of tune. An echo returned a lonely depth of bedroom and hallway space. Silence fell again. With a different finger, she hit an unmusical soprano A-flat. Another oval-shaped print stamped the keyboard. Gray smudges came away on the fore- and middle fingers. A following echo of lonely space died. Then it went very quiet and very still.

Suddenly an interrogative stare came swinging down on her like a blade. She thought she could hear the air particles cut apart and split, and jerked her head up.

In the door was the large wide frame of a gruesome un-adolescent Eren without the details, just the shape of his shoulders and long loose hair. Not even his eyes could be made out. His arms were crossed, she could see, by the way the black figure-shape bulged with tensed biceps. His black undetailed figure flooded the doorway, making him look even older, even more gruesome and unexpected. At first, he said nothing. They were both quiet, looking at the other, not moving.

Then: “Mikasa,” he mumbled. But it was more silence than voice, there wasn’t much voice at all, and she couldn’t make out the details of his mouth. Perhaps his lips hadn’t moved a centimeter.

“Yes?” she said.

“ . . .” he said.

“What is it, Er—”

The black shadow of Eren’s head silently slumped over.

It dropped off the shoulders entirely, unattached, like it’d never been attached in the first place. The rest of him was left standing there, large and gruesome, bodily-unwhole in the doorway. Mikasa’s hands jerked out on their own. Her legs surged forward. She dove with her hands stretched in front of her. Dead weight and loose hair struck her palms. Her fingers grabbed it out of the air.

“Ah.” Mikasa lifted it, turning it over in her hands. She began to shake. “_Ah—_” The lungs dredged up breath for a mounting scream. The scream mounted but nothing ever came. No air had come to the lungs, the lungs drawing in, the air escaping them each time.

There was no breath anywhere forever anymore.

Her body broke into the uncontrollable trembling of a person physically denying an unimaginable horror. An incomprehensible human terror and suffering. Physically unable to endure the actuality of all the eternal things of which a person must endure eternally.

Mikasa looked at it cradled in her hands. In her ribcage, the heart valves began to slow, opening and closing, hard and painful, slowing but never ceasing. Not flowing with blood anymore. The valves pumped granulated fear and suffering like desert sand through the chambers, stirring waves of it, filling her limbs. _No no no no—_

The heart muscle slowed but never ceased. It could endure all the eternal things, anything, anything eternally.

She used her fingers to brush the hair tenderly away.

Her feet ran out the door, back into the living room, she didn’t look where she was going, her hands cradling it with the face up, the eyes staring insentiently with that dead omniscience, seeing everything, beyond everything, her arms stuck out in front of her, shaking, denying what the hands were themselves cradling. The fire gently threw its gentle warm light. Her shadow darted across the rug. Her legs blurred together, nebulous long-shapes alternating with running.

Stretched along the couch, Eren was still lying on his back. Oil and sweat slicked his face. He was still asleep, but his muscles weren’t resting anymore. His body jerked and shivered with dream-electricity. His teeth were gnashed together. Somewhere on the floor, she set down the deer skull (this one was small and skinless), which had fallen from its mount on the bedroom wall (the nails had rusted out, probably), and she kneeled down, putting a hand against his cheek. It was very hot. Her fingers were trembling.

“Eren,” she said. “Are you having a bad dream? Won’t you wake up soon?”

She buried her face in her knees.

# # #

Vertical bars rose from the floor to the ceiling in fixed iron indifference. The cell did not discriminate or calculate; it stood without significance or symbolism. The cell door was closed and locked. Eren Jaeger stood on the one side which seemed to an outside eye to be contained by the iron cell. Confined by it. But the cell was entirely unable to do the containing. The confining. The prison cell served no real purpose at all.

Standing deadpan and motionless, not grabbing the bars, Eren stared through their indifferent rigid spaces from a shadowed down-tilted face that seemed to be a hard unknown face, not fully Eren Jaeger, rigid shadows underlying the unfully Eren-Jaeger face, countless shadows cast by countless others. Within his own infested brain matter, Eren knew that a long time ago he had lost his mind.

On the other side, she stood with the same fixed iron indifference of the prison. Her hair fell straight over both shoulders and down the front of her body. Black rivulets were running down her legs. It was leaking from an open wound that didn’t seem to have been inflicted from an outside foreign object in some method of penetration. It seemed to be an open wound in which the inside had torn out, not penetrating her, but something like its complete and total inverse.

Perhaps the wound was self-inflicted.

There was no way to tell which it was.

The taut bloated stomach bulged quiveringly from out of her small pale body like a thing of its own individuality, nursing its own personal vendetta. The black streams ran faster down her legs, heavier. It smelled not of rust or brass. An undeniably female non-odor. A pool gathered around her feet. Wet chunks of flesh coagulated, shed from her tattered insides, displaced and moved around by the growing mass, flowing out of her now, fast. It was about to arrive.

When she began to squat, Eren stood stock-still, not moving, not grabbing the bars, his eyelids pinned back wide open, his pupils contracted to small black dots, not looking away, frozen inside the indifferent insignificant cell. He was arrested by the immutable male un-experience, the un-empathy, unable to understand what was happening right in front of him. The female body began to horrifically open. Somewhere distantly the snowstorm clashed against the cabin and shook the wood boards. The fire was burning gently.

Between her legs, a thing born out of insatiable wrath and the rage of all-history slickly crowned its soft red skull. Squatting with her feet apart, naked and rigid, the quivering belly violently bulged and moved, her long hair draped down over her shoulders. With an unmotherly incomprehension and terror, she watched the soft red mass come out of her own body. A scream rose up. He did not know from where the scream came; if it had burst from the dilated uninflicted wound between her legs or from out of her warped white face.

Inside the cabin, Eren’s back arched off the couch and twisted in a strange levitation-like contortion. Somehow, Eren knew, whatever had been coming out of her was now coming out of him, transmitted into his belly in some sort of sympathetic surrogacy. He then collapsed back to the cushions and jackknifed at the waist. His mouth protruded, hard and livid, around the mass as it swelled up his throat.

His hand went out and found the man’s shirt, and bunched in his jerky contorted grasp, the shirt rose over Mikasa’s stomach; he did not know this, he couldn’t see her or anything else in front of him. Still without him knowing it, the arm then swiped Mikasa hard, backward, away from him. Her feet backed away heavily and unsteadily.

The gut muscles labored, hot and perspiring with effort, clenched to expel it fast, trying to push it out, giving Eren no time to breathe or think, seized by the singular instinct of a woman in labor to expel and eject. Bracing himself on the sofa’s armrest with one arm, Eren made a dying vomitless vomiting sound as it surged up, solid and whole. His ears rang with blood. Just when he thought he would die, the gut muscles began to slacken and his lungs worked in oxygen. He breathed deeper or at least tried to. He sank back and rested against the couch. He gasped and wetly panted. Gradually his body let go of its suspicion of continued vomiting.

Then it gripped him again, starting all over. His head plunged and strained forward. In his throat, arteries thundered, intense and protuberant. His vision went out.

A bowl hovered beneath him now. Bile drooled from his mouth and poured into the white-moon ceramic. His mouth welled with hot liquid. His lips weakly hung open. He spit. Drool instantly welled back up, boiling in his mouth. He spit again. When he was sure the gut muscles were finished, spent of all their expelling energy, Eren sat back and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His throat and mouth were scorching. 

There was nothing more in his stomach, so there was nothing more to give. The bowl contained only his drool and the black shreds of the canned food, which had now grown solid and cold. Carrying the bowl away, Mikasa disappeared into the darkness where the kitchen was. When she reappeared, her hands were empty. Over his knees, Eren was hunched with his eyes closed. His feet were planted, his legs apart. On the floor nearby were the two bottles of booze. Eren took one, opened it, and lifted his head back. After getting a good mouthful, he relaxed his neck and swished the booze around and swallowed.

“Are you all right?” Mikasa said.

“It’s nothing. I was having a bad dream, is all,” he said hoarsely. He drank from the bottle again; and this time he drank to drink.

“What was it about?”

“Historia.”

“Historia?”

“Yeah.”

The bottle was drank empty. He put it down on the floor. The skinless deer skull was close, watching them through bone sockets. Mikasa had never seen Eren drink before, the deer seemed to have seen everything before. Eren grabbed the second bottle and opened it.

“It was only a dream,” Mikasa said. “You shouldn’t be drinking like that.”

“Like what?” Eren said, and drank. He surprised Mikasa with his drinking in the same way he had surprised her with his height. “My dreams aren’t always dreams. Not lately. Not anymore.”

“You’re going too fast.”

“Not really,” Eren said, and didn’t slow. Mikasa watched, surprised by him.

“Are you feeling anxious about Historia?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you worried she might go against your wish not to put her body at risk?”

Something slipped in his drinking. He wasn’t as good at it suddenly. Booze ran thinly from the corner of his lips.

Mikasa said: “Are you anxious knowing that she could start looking for a man who would submit to her unquestioningly?”

Eren brought the bottle away from his face and dragged his wrist over his mouth. “I thought you were on my side.” He put his eyes on her and idled the drink in his hand. He thought about what he saw in Mikasa’s face. Then her face changed and he thought about that too before speaking again. “At one time she wanted to become closer to you. She thinks you have a lot in common. She has special feelings toward you, Mikasa.”

“I.” Mikasa touched her hair. She looked away. “Yes, Historia is special to me.”

“Then what was with that expression you were making?”

Mikasa thought about what face she was making now and what face she had been making before. She didn’t know what face it was and couldn’t remember what face it had been. She said: “I don’t,” and then Mikasa changed faces again, and Eren thought about this new change while Mikasa didn’t even realize she had changed at all: “I want to protect her but—”

“But?”

“Do you wish it were you? Could you be thinking that if it were you, it’d be a better alternative because you could make sure she wouldn’t be hurt?” No word could express the meaning of what Mikasa was talking about.

Eren licked his lips.

“If it were you,” Mikasa continued steadily, almost objectively, “it wouldn’t have to be painful, it wouldn’t even have to be that unwanted because—”

Then Eren shouted. There were no words or meaning to it. Only harsh, intense volume, cutting her off. Mikasa jolted on her spine. She stared. “What makes you think that I could be better?” he said. “What makes you think that _I _would think I could be better?”

“I only thought—”

“_What_—”

“That out of your own kindness and gentleness—”

“WHAT ABOUT THIS COULD BE KIND OR GENTLE?” Eren was very loud now, gaining more and more heat. His eyes were bright and gleaming and hot. “This isn’t about me. It’s not about who or how or, or, trying to disguise the cruelty of the position she’s been forced into with _gentleness._ This is Historia we’re talking about. Our _friend._”

“Y-yes. Historia . . . ” Pain thundered up behind Mikasa’s eyes. She felt the cumulus masses of an ache ballooning inside her cranium, building with weight and rain, but not actually weight or rain, building with pounds and pounds of blood. She bent her head and put a hand on her forehead, grimacing over the penetrating well of a migraine. Her eyes tightened shut, _Why can’t I think only of her? Why can’t I— His—tor—i——a— I can’t— Eren, Eren, It hurts_—

“Mikasa?” The volume and heat were gone. “Are you having a migraine?”

Distant behind the pain, hearing her own voice but not hearing the words, she said: “Eren, do you have strong feelings for Historia?” not knowing what had been said.

“Strong feelings,” he said hollowly.

Mikasa didn’t say anything more, her eyes were tight shut. Sweat beaded on her face, her head throbbing, her teeth gritted, creaking with pressure.

“What are _your_ feelings for Historia?” Eren said. “Do you hate her?”

“N-no.” Mikasa’s head snapped up. “No,” she said, trying to tell him something more than what she was saying. “It’s not like that.” She began to strain internally, wrestling with herself. Her lips were tightened, full of intent, about to move, trying to tell him again. Eren’s neck hair vibrated. He listened. He was already beginning to guess.

“When you’re close to her, I feel this—heat in my body,” Mikasa flattened a hand over her chest and again visibly struggled to continue telling him. “This violence. And I don’t know what it is or why. Historia . . . it’s not her fault. She’s not to blame. She’s my friend and I don’t want to hold these unfair feelings against her. I am just—a selfish person with a finite heart.” Once it was all out, she stood with her arms limp at her sides, looking pale and physically drained.

“If it’s like that,” Eren said, having already guessed, not in words, not even with his own intuition, but like an outsider looking medically at the signs, diagnosing, “and right now it’s only you and me alone, and Historia is far away from here—— Why is it that you haven’t gotten on your knees already if you’re just so—_selfish?_” He didn’t look at her. He wasn’t looking at anything. It wasn’t even Eren Jaeger speaking anymore. There wasn’t any heat or meanness to his manner. He was saying something insentiently, and somehow omnisciently at the same time. “I don’t know firsthand about this kind of thing. But isn’t that how it usually begins?”

Without her volition, Mikasa’s knees dropped to the floor. She opened her mouth, alarmed. Unaware that she never had the choice to allow or deny, to accept or refuse, ignorant, she was surprised by the automation and viciousness of the fall, already on her knees before she could process the meaning of what had been said, already weakened from fighting herself.

Eren however, who was also unaware, also ignorant of the automated obedience dictating the biological instinct, was beginning to surmise. It could have been the embalmed omniscience connecting him to the knowledge of dead people. It could have been his own terrible fear finally being realized.

He stood in front of her in only those linen shorts, holding the booze bottle. Mikasa looked up at him, her head bent back, her throat turned up, from a position of utter and paradoxical submission. At his full height, Eren stared down on her and stood with his feet apart, his face unfathomable and calm and dark and dissimulated of the inherited rapacious vengeance. He wasn’t kind or unkind. He wasn’t anything.

Mikasa didn’t rise from her knees. The thought never even occurred to her that she could get up or that she might want to. Then she began to think about what was going to happen. She knew he was about to get ready to tell her to do it, though his hands hadn’t moved yet, the one still holding the glass bottle, he hadn’t begun to move at all yet, and the thought of not wanting it would never come, could never come. And she couldn’t even realize her own limitations, her own unimagination, the subhuman un-individuality because the automated submission was coded into her blood and she had learned about only half of her own ancestry: that of the matriarch. But it was that of the patriarch which smothered the individuality under the submissive instinct.

“You’re joking,” Eren said. He did not laugh. His expression was filled with a dark, silent almost-outrage, staring down on her upturned face and throat. His hands had never moved since he began to speak. “Do you have any idea how you look right now?”

“How would I know,” Mikasa said quietly, sitting on her knees, “what I look like?”

Eren closed his eyes. She could see his eyeballs looking around behind the eyelids. When his eyes came open, they weren’t seeing her, trained on her face. He offered the bottle, holding it out. Silently she took it. He turned away. As he moved again to the sofa, the muscles in his shirtless back seemed to also contain an expression of dark, silent almost-outrage. 

Getting to her feet, Mikasa pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead, alarmed. It was an undefinable sense of violation, one which she could not fully comprehend. It churned in her subconscious like an unseen current at the bottom of a flood. She put the bottle to her lips. Wincing, she shuddered and felt the booze drop, hard and solid, to the bottom of her belly.

“I don’t know what she’s even talking about.” Eren was mumbling to himself, lying on the couch. “Unfair feelings, a finite heart?” Then not to himself anymore, turning his face: “Now what are you doing, Mikasa?”

“There’s something about me,” she said, wincing at the alcohol weighing down her gut, “that’s not normal. Isn’t there?”

Eren looked at her. On the couch, his body lied prone and perfectly impassive.

“What should I,” she said, then restarted. “Will you tell me what I should do?”

Eren looked at the ceiling, impassive, mumbling to himself again. “Why would I?” He rolled over. Then not to himself: “Tell yourself what to do, Mikasa. You should be able to do that on your own, right?”

_I don’t know. I don’t know. I—_

Eren looked larger than ever, lying with his back facing her, falling asleep again.

His hair seemed very long.

He looked like his father.

But bigger.

Then he looked like neither.

Un-Grisha.

Un-Eren.

Mikasa turned. The booze jostled around, solid in her gut.

Above the fireplace, the dead deer-head was watching everything in the world.


	2. Chapter 2

# # #

On his side, too long for the sofa, with a hand nestled under his cheek lied Eren. The firewood had run out. Now bits of furniture and house-paraphernalia, anything dry and combustible, burned. There was enough of it to gas ten fires. Plenty to sustain them for the rest of the night. A derelict piano leg crackled fitfully and threw fitful light over Mikasa, who stood and watched it burn. Reflections and refractions played in her eyes. She was at the epicenter of Eren’s lethargic view.

Under the man’s shirt, Mikasa’s bare legs were long and drawn-out, he noticed. Legs like a flume that flowed down perpetually, never landing, pouring right out of sight. Then Eren’s eyes followed, dropping, suddenly falling to the white froth of her feet. Her feet were carved with toes and nails and pores and other minutiae, shaped by a steady hand and a carving knife. Then Eren realized he was looking at a wooden doll.

Mikasa stood as a wooden doll would stand with wooden doll parts, draped with a fall of coarse synthetic hair. It had been dyed an imitation black hue that looked lifelike but in imitation only. _Almost_ real, but not quite.

_—There’s something about me that’s not normal. Isn’t there?_

The closer an imitation reaches lifelike, the more grotesque _almost_ becomes. And this wood doll was a grotesquery of _almost_. It had a slight wrongness. And the slighter a wrongness is, the deeper it feels. And it felt very deep when Eren looked at Mikasa, who was not Mikasa, but in fact a wooden doll.

In Mikasa’s joints swiveled metal screws, which enabled the wood-limbs some mobility and when her arms crossed, material grated on material. The screws shuddered and whined. Eren licked his lips. Fear started to boil up again; his mouth tasted bile. With her head angled back slightly, Mikasa stood there with the almost lifelike hair, plastic and unshifting, the taxidermied deer mounted on the wall above her, as dead as dead was dead.

Eren shut his eyes. He opened them. Light struck a chemical patina coating Mikasa’s body-surface and gleamed.

“Mikasa,” Eren said, “there’s something with your body.”

“My body?” Mikasa turned around.

“You—” The capillaries in Mikasa’s cheeks had distended and rosied her complexion; her eyes were a little glassy. “Do you feel drunk?” he said finally. “You’re blushing.”

“What?” Mikasa’s palms palpated her face. She felt warm. She’d been feeling very warm for a while. Now she knew what it was. “But I don’t think I’m—” That’s when Eren started to laugh. Mikasa frowned and smoothed her hair and palpated her face again; the skin was hot like a sunburn.

Eren laughed with his diaphragm and the laughter was altogether so unlikely it could’ve been Mikasa’s imagination making it up. Eren hardly laughed. He hadn’t laughed since—she couldn’t remember an exact time, it felt like decades. And the times he did laugh, she remembered, it was mirthless and sounded a little wrong, sometimes perverted, but it was good now, a good laughter— Then it shut off like a switch. It could really have been Mikasa’s imagination making it up.

It wasn’t her imagination though because something was changed in the cabin. The air, the quality, something about the cabin became infused with something in the laughter. It was a shimmery infusion, and light, it reminded her of silver moonwash, and it whirled in a sublimated juggernaut of whims. All of a sudden, billions of unfathomabilities and phantasmagorias were careening and blinking into the cabin’s pocket of winter solitude, as though there were no ceiling, no storm, only a gentle December night over them and them cradled inside it.

Mikasa dropped her eyes and fixed her hair again, glowing because of the allergic reaction, and thought the alcohol might be getting to her. This wasn’t it, either. The half-bottle she finished was too little and too diluted to work any inebriating magic.

“My mother used to turn red after drinking alcohol,” Mikasa told Eren. “It didn’t matter how much or how little.”

“So you inherited alcohol intolerance from your mother,” he said. “How unlucky.”

The laughter had communicated that shimmery quality onto Eren too. His face was the face of somebody about to disintegrate into steam and float languorously out the chimney. With his cheek still in his hand, still lying on his side, Eren looked at Mikasa with all the unfathomability and phantasmagoria of languor and light. Mikasa reached across her body to grip the opposite arm, feeling warm, feeling him looking at her, feeling her own bareness which she’d forgotten about but now remembered; feeling everything. Her heart started to hurt.

“It’s been a while since I’ve heard you laugh,” she said. She couldn’t tell what her face muscles were doing. She might’ve been smiling a little.

“I feel different here,” he said.

“I do too.”

Every ounce of Eren’s attention probed tangibly into Mikasa, she was very aware of her own skin. Then the force came off her when his eyelids came down. Mikasa could breathe again.

Still standing in front of the fire, she watched the flames and almost thought she could hear the faint infinitesimal whisper of Eren’s face disintegrating behind her, the softness taking over. She knew Eren was turning to steam. She also knew he wasn’t turning to steam. Still, she could hear the whispering sublimation like a forceless fire sedating each rumple and artery of anxiety tunneling into his deepest consciousness and horror and the hundred generations of rage, uprooting it, nonviolently immolating it gone.

It could’ve been the booze warming Eren. It could’ve been the fire warming him. She didn’t know what the whispering was. If it was a voice. A sound. An aura. An omen. Something she couldn’t see. Diffusing the room, the cabin, the forest, something inside herself. All she knew was that her heart was hurting.

When Eren opened his eyes again, he saw Mikasa in front of the fire, all shadow and extremities; she was a wooden doll again, standing as a wooden doll would stand, with screws in her bones and black synthetic hair, him lying on the sofa behind her, going crazy again. Hallucinating again. He blinked a firm, sanity-prompting blink; his eyelids pinched the light into a bruised starburst and it brimmed over and renounced the doll. He looked at Mikasa again.

The large man’s shirt was swimming shapelessly around her. Then it wasn’t anymore. It was puddled at her feet.

Without Mikasa having to do the undressing, without him having to ask her to do the undressing, without him having to ask if he could do the undressing for her, it happened. There had been none of the attention or appreciation of nakedness before. Only a practical indifferent displacement of clothes. Inexplicit nudity, more or less.

If it had occurred to him before now, maybe Eren would’ve asked her to take the shirt off. Maybe if had occurred to either of them before now, Mikasa could’ve gotten naked to get naked because she wanted to and Eren could’ve done the same. But now it was too late.

Down around Mikasa’s feet, the shapeless pool of cloth was off like a whisper, a sound, something of the sort; Mikasa had been the first to perceive it, as though the thought had been haunting her all along; hearing the sound of clothing coming off hours before Eren saw the puddling of fabric. It was the feeling of the shirt being off even while it was on which had haunted Mikasa since waking in front of the fire, gathered in the care of Eren’s arms, before she’d even put on the shirt, before the shirt had even been found, haunted by the feeling of it puddled at her ankles before she had ever even stood naked in front of Eren’s eyes.

A little wide-eyed, still lying on his side, holding his cheek, Eren stared at the shirt on the floor. Everything was quiet. There was nothing but the evocative fire burning.

When Eren’s eyes left the floor, they didn’t lift, they didn’t move in any direction or communicate any images into the mind. His eyes were at once removed from the shirt and then put on her face. Looking at the puddled clothing, then looking at the face, cutting past everything between.

When his eyes got to her face, he saw this: Hair that was long and gold; eyes that were blue; eyes that were magnetizing him in a coquettish gaze rimmed by a set of artificially defined eyelashes. Eren saw this, and found that he had been expecting this. Not an inch did he move. In front of him, two different women were standing, and neither woman was more abstract than the other.

Eren’s mind had become split, acting like Two—

One: Mikasa was motionless in front of the fire, still wearing the man’s white shirt, muffled big and dresslike. She was still a wooden doll with screws bulging and glinting in her knees, her back to Eren, perfectly carved and polished.

Two: A woman Eren didn’t know now but had known before he’d been born, two lifetimes prior, danced in front of the fire, swaying to invisible music. Silky sheets of shadow shrouded her, reducing her to a silhouette with shadow-silk eyes and long hair and silk thighs, solar-eclipsed in paradoxes and animal magnetism.

The woman danced an exotic theater of shadow and firelight, titillating him with an impossible striptease: Her arms tossed shadows aside like diaphanous veils and black feathers, and each time she threw aside a veil, more sheets of shadow came up to cover her again, quickly obscuring what had been unconcealed, allowing only dim fleeting glimpses of her body. She was already completely undressed, somehow stripping for him in piecemeal all the same.

No longer lying on his side, Eren was sitting up now, his feet planted on the floor, feeling just as confused as he was oriented: He remembered he was stranded in a cabin with Mikasa. He also remembered that he was at a— Yes, he could remember that now, and he was there without Mikasa, Mikasa wasn’t even born yet.

In the one mind, Mikasa didn’t move or speak. She didn’t even turn her head over her shoulder to look at Eren, immobile and wooden, disjointed into various wood parts. In the second mind, the woman sublimated Eren with her dance, streamers of flame dancing in the background, their dual hypnotic rhythms transmuting Eren’s bloodstream into useless soporific molasses. Perfume filled his mind. His body began to let go, disintegrating. He was disintegrating into a languorous cloud.

Motion rolled down the woman in waves that alluded to a promise and fulfillment of empty primal fantasies; the night would conclude with the melody of her tawdry moans. Eren knew what to expect. This wasn’t his first time at a love-shack. But this was his first time at a love-shack. He remembered that now. He watched Mikasa stand completely still, watched the woman of the pastlife perform gushingly, him disintegrating all the time. Floating away.

Suddenly the Two minds began to run over, leaking into each other, and Eren couldn’t distinguish the past from the present, or the future, and then it was Mikasa dancing, wearing nothing, sheets of fire-heat swirling around her like a visible creature of snake-coil lace binding her body in rope, from the hands lifted over her head to her sylphlike ankles under her, suspending her by the wrists, as if she were about to be crucified, girdled in an intricate design of sheer smoke bondage.

In the second mind the woman had been dancing, but that woman was not Mikasa. And Mikasa was not dancing. The heat of the fire had forced itself on Mikasa. It molested her, it charged and activated muscles, stimulated reflexes and unwanted reactions, and she couldn’t help but to squirm and twist under the fire’s invisible assault as it violated every intimate part of her. Mikasa didn’t make a sound. Nor would she.

Eren’s temples registered a psychosomatic pain and trauma and he tried to rattle the thoughts away. Ramming the heels of his hands into his temporal arteries, lock-jawed, he squeezed the two minds, trying to shove them back together, and ground his teeth and tried not to see the pictures he saw. This made his sight go dark, but the visions continued. The minds were further breaking.

—the woman was filling her hands with Eren’s chest, murmuring directly in his ear, “Eren Jaeger, huh?” She was mostly breath now, her hands feeling him, her raspy feminine voice wicked and coquettishly scathing, “You must be a miserable man, coming here with an alias like that. You aren’t deceiving anybody, darling. Let alone a whore. My kind revolutionized role-play.”

—still a wooden doll, still standing motionless, Mikasa was devoured by the deer’s dead-glass eyes, her eyes drawn to it too. They stared at each other, read each other’s minds, shared taxidermy secrets and dead velvet thoughts. They didn’t look away from each other.

—then the woman’s hands were tearing open Eren’s shirt, the buttons popping off, skittering across the floor (he wasn’t wearing a shirt), her knees jammed him backward and pinned him flat to the frame of a straight-backed armchair (he was sitting alone on a sofa).

When Mikasa turned, she saw Eren and froze. His eyes were like that of the deer head, blind-eyed marbles like they could see everything. Beyond everything. A sight that was passive and passively contained rather than actively sending images to the mind where they were registered and processed. Mikasa went to him on her naked feet. Eren blindly watched her. He blindly watched something else too.

“Eren?”

The woman began to laugh without looking at her hands as they unbuckled his pants, not needing to look, knowing by memory the universal script of undoing brass buttons, the pinch of zipper, the parting yawn of metal tracks. “Sad men are only caricatures of the real thing,” she was saying. “It’s like an amateur comedy skit. You have to laugh out of pity to get any joy out of it.” Once his pants were opened, she bestrode him, mounted him like a saddle, hiking a leg up and over to seat herself across his legs. “Are you an authentic sad man? ’cause you sure look it.”

“I’m only a dying man,” said somebody in Eren’s voice, “who’s lived a sad life.”

“You sorry old bastard.” The woman grinned craftily. “My sympathy’s only as deep as your pockets, darling. Kiss me, now. Hurry.”

“Eren,” Mikasa said. “What are you saying all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” Eren said.

Eren had become undefined. Undefined like liquid, able to take the shape of whatever contained him. Mikasa did not know this, but Eren was being contained by another woman of another lifetime. Mikasa could see only Eren’s strange formlessness: the strange concave dent of hip muscles where invisible knees clasped him. Then, without knowing why, it could’ve been the law of the universe or the cabin’s inescapable compulsion, Mikasa stretched one leg around Eren and then the other, containing him in the precise shape his body had already assumed, molding herself into the container to contain Eren retroactively.

Now Eren was caught between the knees of the other woman, simultaneously caught between the knees of Mikasa, in the same position at the same instant, both sitting in his lap, their hands on his shoulders.

Mikasa looked intently into his Eren’s face, not understanding. “Are you still upset about the nightmare?” Her intent face leaned even closer, with intent eyes and intent lips exhaling breath that washed over him with sweet gentle intensity. “When we get back home, we can go to see Historia together,” she told him. “I’m sure she’ll be grateful for the company.”

_Who? _said Eren, but he actually only thought it, only seeing Mikasa in halflight. Half mind.

Right now, Eren wasn’t fully Eren Jaeger. This was because in a small lot of Eren Jaeger’s brain, there was a gravesite, and in this gravesite resided another man, who was not Eren Jaeger but was not completely un-Eren-Jaeger either.

In a love-shack in a seedy Marley district, this man who was not completely un-Eren-Jaeger sat in a straight-backed armchair, a prostitute gushing from his arms, overflowing; she was a large woman of thighs and breasts, swollen with both in equal proportion, a soft inflated figure, practically opulent—and the woman was kissing him, kissing Eren. Kissing both men with hands in hair, on the back of neck, sly nails skimming scalp, petting little networks of nerves under untouched boy-skin which had evolved a few months ago into untouched young-man-skin, but was also the matured-man-callus of a tough and experienced veteran who resided in a gravesite hollowed out for depths and depths in Eren Jaeger’s brain matter.

“The war’s all over you,” the woman said, licking his lips. “I can taste it, even. What are you waiting for? Don’t you want to put your tongue in my pretty pink pussy? ha ha ha.”

It was strange, Mikasa thought (who existed only within the plane of the first mind), how one of Eren’s eyes seemed to be looking at her and the other seemed to be staring straight through her, unseeing. Cataracts were confusing Eren and clouding him, and she didn’t know how to rectify the holes in his consciousness, only recognizing the blindness, unable to do anything about it.

Eren, dissected by both minds, both planes, began to shift under Mikasa, hearing the woman again, murmuring at him, _Eat my cunt, baby,_ in graphic language he’d never even thought to imagine, thinking it was Mikasa, probably?, panting at him, knowing it wasn’t Mikasa, or was it?—_hurry, now, It’s hot and wet for you,—_ Mika, ? no, but who? it couldn’t, it’s not_—It wants you, you sad beautiful dying man,—_is it? the sinew in Eren’s eyeballs pulled his pupils wider, and wider, and dark, and black to all-receive and all-absorb, the firelight was a dim haze of duplicitous flickering covering Eren for miles, at once in the cabin and someplace else, bifurcated across time and memory, maybe life and death too_—_ _Fuck me like it’s the end of the world_, the woman was saying and he knew what the end of the world looked like, and she had told him to fuck her like that, or was it Mikasa telling him to? He didn’t know.

As if he were possessed by the blindness, Eren reached his face up to Mikasa’s. Straddling him on the wingback sofa, still not knowing why or how she came to straddle him, Mikasa stared down at Eren with depthless incomprehension, not knowing what it was that he wanted. The not-knowing derived from a belief, an acknowledgement, an acceptance of the irrefutable fact of his indifference, the asexual un-curiosity, the physical and emotional inertia and immunity. Even as he lifted his lips to hers, Mikasa believed in this fact, never doubting it. Even as he put his arms around her and she sank flush to his mouth, she never believed anything other than what she had already come to know.

All the world and all of time the ubiquitous deer eyes saw, and Eren’s hands filled with muscular thighs, metal bolts there too, creaking—and the broad putty thighs of another. The cabin’s temperature started to warm where Mikasa’s skin permeated it. Now Eren and Mikasa breathed hot sweet breath into each other’s mouths: his tinged with a faint sickly-sweet aftertaste of blood and bile, hers packed with the chalky dry ash of sawdust. Neither one minded this. Nor did they stop kissing. Screw-jointed elbows and screw-jointed wrists held Eren’s shoulders in place; then her wrists moved to frame his head. Then Eren was free. He could see Mikasa again—them, both she and the other woman.

The two minds, the two events, the two nights unfolded together, one night unfolding the other as it simultaneously unfolded itself. Occurring in instantaneity.

Now this began to unfold: Eren and Mikasa had moved from the sofa to the floor, but they had moved without doing the relocating themselves. They were just suddenly there. Without activity, without time passing, they appeared there on the floor, together. The linen shorts were gone. And neither Eren nor Mikasa knew when or how this had happened. All that mattered: Eren was naked, explicitly naked—and stretched out prone on her back, still in the large man’s shirt, was Mikasa, the white cotton lying flat against her body.

By her feet, Eren hovered on his hands and knees. They both knew what was going to happen, but they didn’t know how to get there. And even though it was a mysterious matter to both of them, neither person said a word or offered instruction or suggestion, thinking it would be the other to speak first. Mikasa figured Eren would tell her what to do and how to do it because he must know being a man, and Eren thought the same of her for being a woman.

So it transpired in silence as they began to figure it out.

Eren’s head disappeared under the man’s shirt. Glands in Mikasa’s mouth turned on and she swallowed and tasted citrus and when she felt the muscles of Eren’s lips kneading the inside of her legs, she brought up her knees and swallowed thickly again. The ceiling swung into view and blurred, and then doubled. Into her eyes had seeped something like a dark blot of death. Below her stomach a dark lusty energy started to claw its way out and rumble ominously through her hamstrings. Hearing it, Eren seized her legs with his arms, gripping her thighs apart. Mikasa’s heart thudded fast and hard like she was running without doing the running.

Soundlessly she writhed, her eyes stained by a figurative death. She didn’t know what was beginning to start to happen because it had never happened to her before and it wasn’t like anything that had happened to her in all her life so she didn’t know what to do and instead let it act on her without interfering. The writhing was now acting on her. Not trying to stop it, she let her body squirm and tremble.

Fixed in Eren’s grasp, her legs quivered, wanting to clap tight together, no matter that Eren’s face was buried between them; she’d clap her knees around his eardrums, shatter them, compress his cerebral cortex, crush his brain like a peach. He didn’t let that happen. He gripped her hard and static, his foreceps strapped with strong veins, forcing her to let that thing like running beat her under its blood-pounding course and obliterate every knot and nerve in her system. She held her breath, trying to fight him, sweat dripping into her eyelashes, obliterated thoroughly by spits of endorphinic waves. Then Eren stopped and lifted his face. Down where his lips had been, the knot of nerves was raw with the indelible print of his tastebuds.

Lying there, Mikasa caught her breath silently. Everything about her went on in silence. Her profile was wrung and mournful and savage, somewhat expectant when Eren moved over her on his hands and knees. He was halfway ignorant of the how. Not even in his half-made imagination had he dreamed up a fiction of performing the how because of the un-curious nature that kept him undistracted and undiverted from the matters of war.

Then when Eren came up on top of her, Mikasa stiffened and flinched at an image. As she looked up from her position on the floor, with the deer head mounted on the wall behind him, it appeared as though two antlers were branching up and outward, bulging out of Eren’s overgrown hair. Mikasa thought, _No, that can’t be the symbolism. It isn’t even an illusion or metaphor. It’s the opposite— _

Up his neck and into his hair, Mikasa’s hands reached and felt and even though she knew it couldn’t be there—it was only the angle, the image—animal bone protruded and grew from his skull. She tested it, stroked it, not believing it. Under her fingertips vibrated a warm living velvet. She didn’t understand. She was confused. What was happening? she thought.

Her hands seized the two stalks; they were not the grand masculine flare of a mature crown-prize buck. Lesser than that. Lesser by years. They were only just beginning to flourish with young-buck bravado and sex-appeal. This wasn’t the correct symbolism, it couldn’t be real either; Mikasa knew this as she began to twist at the bone. While Mikasa yanked the antlers, through dead omniscient eyes, Eren watched her face, seeing her bared teeth, her struggle. Her knuckles jabbed shiny and white, tearing now, vehemently.

Blood began to run over her hands.

Mikasa gasped, opened her fingers, and studied her own wet hands uncomprehendingly. _No, impossible, it’s not_—

Down Eren’s temples dribbled the dark red mammal blood, his hairline matted down, his eyes like taxidermy, with an expression unaffected, unhurt, and unresponsive.

Then when he began to speak, Eren’s voice was not Eren’s voice: “What’s the matter, Mikasa?” It was not Eren Jaeger speaking at all.

“What? Who?” said the woman. “Is that the girl you’ve been thinking of all night? It’s all right, honey. Don’t be ashamed. Go on, call her name. Sing it. Bark it. Whatever. I don’t mind. I’ll even keep calling you Eren Jaeger if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”

“I’ll know her two lifetimes from now,” the man said. His name was Kruger and he had the face of a sad dying man covered with war and darkness under his cheekbones, which might have been the premonition of Eren Jaeger lying in wait. “He won’t do anything then,” Kruger said, “not on a night like this with the fire going and the wailing black wind rattling the cabin. I know it’s all in my head. I know what’s not going to happen. And I know it’s not going to happen because I’m not the one who saves her and he isn’t me, he isn’t even like me. If I were him or if we were alike, I would’ve already done it.”

“Whom do you mean?” the woman said.

“Eren Jaeger.”

“A-ha. You didn’t fool me for a second. I knew he wasn’t you.”

“Not now, but he will be.”

“Oh, my god. You’re crazy, aren’t you?”

“He won’t do it,” Kruger continued, “because he could see the metal screws. They bolted her parts together like a faceless featureless wood manikin for an artist to manipulate and pose. He might’ve been losing his mind, but Eren Jaeger wasn’t wrong. He couldn’t stand seeing her that way because he wasn’t an artist. He was just a monster with the power to control and oppress and dominate and flatten the earth under his wrath.”

“You can control me if you want. I’ll even bend over your knee if you’d like me to. I don’t care that you’re crazy.”

“No, it’s all right. Will you listen as I continue telling the story of what happened in that cabin?”

“Why, honey, we’re in the middle of doing naked business,” the woman said. Kruger was sitting in the straight-backed armchair and she was on her knees in front of him. She’d been performing an act on him while he went off on a story about a wooden doll and a mounted deer-head, who were about to make love to each other in a strange cabin. Every client had his fetishes. This one wasn’t all that odd, the woman thought.

“Most importantly I’m not fond of storytelling,” she told Kruger. “I find it very boring. Once you’ve heard a handful of stories, you’ve heard them all. Originality is only a plagiarism of an original, and originals don’t exist, darling. Each story tries to outdo the other and stand out in its self-proclaimed innovation when it’s really only spectacular in its platitudinous mediocrity, making it altogether unspectacular. Men are the same way,” she continued. “Women too, I suppose. But now that I think about it, I guess I haven’t listened to any story a crazy man has to tell. There aren’t very many crazy men to begin with. They might even be mythical creatures, men with holes in their brains. That’s a woman’s trait. Women were made to be more . . . porous. We’ve got all those lovely orifices that drive men wild, and can make even a smart, sophisticated man go savage. You see what I mean?”

“No, I don’t know much about that,” said Kruger.

“Of course you wouldn’t. Well, anyway, I’ll go ahead and listen to your story. I’m sure it’ll be fine if I sit in your lap.”

“Yes, that’ll be fine.”

She straddled him and her blond hair shined when she shook it out over her shoulder blades. “Go on, then. I’m listening.” But Kruger didn’t go on. Their two shadow-bodies were stationary, their clothes scattered like paint on the floor. A fire was burning and it was rather quiet. Something was wrong. She said: “You’re not also a stupid man, are you? You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” Their shadows shifted into an inextricable palpitating single. The wrong was now corrected. “Just keep listening,” Kruger said. “Will you do that?”

“Yes, okay, yes, yes, I’ll listen, I’m listening—”

“Where was I?”

“Eren Jaeger wasn’t going to do it,” the woman said helpfully, and her blond hair was shining again, and Kruger watched it shine, distracted for a moment, “because he felt bad about the screws in the wooden doll’s bones.”

“Yes, the girl was lying under him—”

Still in front of the fire, braced on his hands, Eren looked down at her lying under him. They were connected at the waist, but he didn’t feel it. Long hair was gushed out across the floor in a gold shine. Staring at him, the girl’s eyes were glass holes. Devoid. Defiled by the cyclical misappropriation that had gone on for a hundred years. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, her hands groping into his hair. They found no knob or bulge of extraneous cervine bone.

“Get it over with, Eren,” she said. And her voice was devoid like the eyes. And he could only barely remember who she was.

Eren felt heavy water in his belly. Like he hadn’t regurgitated all the lake water from when his lungs had flooded. It sloshed around inside him when he moved. She stared steadily, immovable. Not even jerking with him as the drowned water sloshed back and forth heavily in his stomach. He stopped. Her hands grasped at his hair, hurting him a little.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you _dare_.”

When Eren looked at her, he knew that she knew she was hurting him.

“Ah,” he said and drew his bottom lip under his teeth. He started jerking again. She didn’t jerk under him, immovable, watching his face, devoid of anything. The stale water sloshed around in his belly like he was already dead from drowning in the lake. Their two bodies didn’t touch but at the necessary junction with her hands in his hair, wringing him whenever he started to think he wanted to stop without beginning to stop, just thinking about wanting to, and she somehow felt it like she could see it in his face. And then he did stop. Her hands wrung at his hair, hurting him hard because she had him under her reign, dominating, and he was supposed to be the submissive. His teeth sank deeper into his bottom lip, chewing through the skin.

“Aren’t you going to save me?” she said, wrenching fistfuls of his hair.

“Ah,” his teeth pulled at his own lower lip, his eyelids taut and half-shut, his head bent under her small strong wrists.

“I won’t hate you. I’ll only hate my father. So let out that unforgiving monster inside you. Ignore your humanity. Exploit me without any remorse or mercy. This isn’t your doing, it’s the world and all of history who has raped every descendant of the Reiss matriarchy for a hundred years. I won’t even blame you.”

A thread of blood welled under Eren’s teeth and trickled down his chin, his eyelids taut half-clamped slits. Then as she looked at him, seeing the suffering face he made, her mouth fell open, channeling slow charged air through her lips which were softened like she’d been melted by a sudden contradictory onset of physical desire, though she had not desired any man at all in all her life.

Then her head lifted from the floor. Eren stretched his head up and away. Yanking his hair in her small hands, she whispered against his lips: “I will be the worst queen to ever reign these walls, I will never become a titan for anybody,” and dragged him down, forcing their faces together, sucking the blood from his mouth in a malicious affectionless kiss. That’s when he stopped resisting. With the cataracts clouding his eyes, hundreds of gravesites riddling his brain, he kissed her back with an equal degree of passionless malice. Their faces broke apart. They scowled at each other.

“Now, Eren. It’s time.”

His teeth caught his lip again, drawing blood again. A thin orange line crept down his chin. The water sloshed around heavily, bloating him, crashing around in his stomach, making him sick with motion. Then it began to leak from his pores and ducts. It emerged like sweat, wetting him until he was drenched, swimming now or just helplessly sinking.

He knew then that he couldn’t do it.

“Why can’t you?” she said, knowing too that he couldn’t do it without him having to tell her. “Aren’t you a man now? or are you still a self-pitying brat?” She hadn’t moved at all, making him do all the moving. His motion didn’t transfer to her, didn’t go through her. It didn’t seem to contact any part of her. “Damn you, Eren. Will I have to extract it from you? Is that what you’ll make me do, you stupid crybaby?”

He was panting, trying to breathe. But the breath only brushed the top of his lungs, it wasn’t anything like breathing.

“I’m not crying,” he said. The top of his lungs only tasted breath, never getting a good enough swallow to quench the panting. “I would if I could and make it burst out.” Instead here he was working and working and it was just sitting there, cramping excruciatingly, coiled up just under his blood at a faraway simmer. He wasn’t talking about tears and he knew that she knew he wasn’t talking about tears.

She glared self-righteously.

“Why can’t you, huh?” she said. “Too caring? too _moral?_”

“Ha.”

“Would you rather be doing it with a horse? a cow? an old bitch in heat? Would that make it easier?”

Then it was not tears that burst out of him. “_Ha ha ha ha ha_—” At first it had the strange overwrought quality of sobbing hysterics. But it wasn’t that. A shuddering falsetto of laughter disgorged from his mouth the way tears flow from the eyes or the way sweat pours from the skin. Not thinking about doing it, not doing it by choice. Just bursting with it.

He no longer looked at her face. He saw nothing now, not her naked body in his view where his eyes were levelled, not even the shade of his own eyelids. A metamorphosis was taking place. An epidemic of agony and fury began to boil over. The trembling started in his shoulders and seeped through his muscles, enveloping him in a kind of hysterical membrane, until every muscle shook and laughed. The flesh of his face tore open with a sound like splitting paper. Flushing hard with blood, the titan marks darkened until they turned into black. The skull sockets crackled with quantum energy. He hadn’t stopped laughing.

Lake water didn’t slosh around anymore. Braced on his hands, he jerked and thrusted, unhuman noises disgorged from his throat like metal grinds and growls, his face dark and lined with titan scars. Her hands, still grasping at his hair, didn’t loosen, wringing him like a wild belligerent mammal. Her body was unmoving and machinelike. She sponged up his movement without sound, without exerting any effort, like some kind of indifferent unsatisfying absorbent material that stifled each punctuation of impact. Her face watched him out of an impervious stare, seeing his bent head which saw nothing. She was not receiving him. She didn’t seem to be connected to him at any part. It was a machinelike and maybe even sterile transaction.

His snarling breaths spun hot and steaming down against her face, his body working and grueling, locked in the thrusting repetition, every muscle contracted with impotent strain, going and going by mechanization now, robotic unfeeling instinct.

He couldn’t stop.

He couldn’t finish.

“No,” Kruger said. “That isn’t how I wanted to tell it.” They were on the bed now, and the flames were beginning to sag in the fireplace. “I must’ve let my mind wander,” he explained. “Your blond hair resembles hers. She had yellow hair too, and blue eyes. They were traits prevalent in the royal family; they distinguished her apart from others as the devil queen.”

“Blond hair, blue eyes, etcetera,” the woman said boredly. “Petite little body, a soft tummy like a kitten’s, etcetera. A prototype of beauty, etcetera. This story is as ancient as Ymir’s unbroken hymen.” She scratched Kruger’s back lovingly with her manicured nails. “I have secret weapons. Want to know what they are?” She waited.

“What?”

“A huge rack and baby fat.”

Kruger smiled. He went on: “Well, this isn’t that story. It never was. Eren Jaeger didn’t conceive a child with a royal matriarch. It was the father who had a son with a woman of that special ancestry, fathering a half-royal firstborn of the Fritz family. Eren Jaeger, the second son of that ill-fated man, birthed from a woman of no exceptional ancestry, had only wanted to unshackle the Reiss lineage from an incestuous fate of chattel monarchy and humored no aspiration, despite rumor and speculation, of following in the footsteps of his late father in consummating a merger between two hopeless irredeemable histories.”

“Enough about that,” the woman said. “It’s all just boring convolutions, and I’m getting bored listening to it. Tell me about Eren Jaeger. Tell me what he was like.”

“What he was like?”

“He was an animal, wasn’t he? An absolute _animal_.” She moaned and tossed her head back.

“Probably not the animal you’re thinking of.”

“If he’s going to be you like you said, why are you pretending to be this pitiful excuse of a satire? Why not show me Eren Jaeger? Why don’t you give him to me, _please?_ Let me see Eren Jaeger.”

“I’m only telling you.”

“For goodness sake, don’t tell it wrong, then,” she said. “All right, I’m listening. Go on.”

“Well, it was the wrong woman.”

“Clearly.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t only the woman that was wrong. It was also the history that was wrong. His ideologies—or what he thought he remembered—hadn’t aligned and that’s why she couldn’t be moved, no matter how great a force he used against her. So when he opened his eyes again, he hadn’t changed position at all, still braced on his hands, but the cabin had sucked him back into it without time having moved a second. The storm still fulminated outside and she was still wearing that man’s shirt with nothing underneath, lying on her back like the other woman had done during the extraction that never happened.”

“Of course, it never happened,” the woman said. “Coercion had put her womb up for sale and strung her neck in a noose. There was no love,” she went on, “which Eren Jaeger believed in but only in abstraction. And he could no longer be cornered or caught between a rock and a hard place because he was like oil; he had usurped the power to change the very perception in which the demon’s race digested and justified history. Therefore he relied on subterfuge. Everything, everything, subterfuge, him feeding it down their throats with his oily lubrication, them swallowing it up unresistingly. One subterfuge layered upon another subterfuge in a buffet of deceit, executed outside the circles of the military, outside the eyes of everyone else in the world which had gone to hell, and he was only supposed to be the devil about to bring forth the end of the world.”

“I’m afraid I’m not here to tell you that story,” said Kruger. “I’m only here to tell you a love story.”

“Love stories give me indigestion,” the woman said. “But since you’re sad and crazy and such, it must be well enough. Okay. Okay. I’m ready. Give it to me.”

Although Eren Jaeger was still braced on his hands in the same exact position as before, it took some time to return. The hearing took the longest. He saw Mikasa’s lips moving and even though her speaking scratched at his ear drums, the hearing was only beginning to resurface. The speech started at a silence and grew into an indecipherable undersea noise and then: “Eren, stop.”

Eren concluded without being certain that he must still be jerking, trying to move the immovable body and finally complete the machinelike transfer, his body unaware that he had been transplanted back into the cabin, continuing to do what it’d been doing for an hour or two now by pure overworked reflex, locked in a repetition. When he told himself to stop, it took no physical effort to still himself. It was like his mind didn’t need to command the muscles into motionlessness; that he simply needed to believe in the motionlessness for it to occur.

Mikasa said, “You’re hurting yourself. You’re—” Her hands lifted to his mouth and when she took her fingers away, the tips were shining red.

Eren’s teeth retracted from the bottom lip. A swollen crescent stamped there, oozing a little, and smeared his chin. The titan marks writhed back into the eye sockets. On her fingertips, the blood evaporated into smoke.

“Sorry,” he said.

Mikasa had watched Eren return and break out of the trance he’d been in, frozen over her for the last few minutes. She could see it in his eyes as he came out of the dream. The awareness rose like a lurking shadow at the bottom of a brown lake, drifting up toward the surface, growing larger, brighter, coalescing, beginning to shine silver, finally taking the form of a fish a person might suspect was sitting at the bottom of the lake all along. Now that he was back, neither of them spoke at first. They’d been on the floor, him on top of her, both completely still.

“Eren, it’s okay,” Mikasa said after a while. “Eren, there’s something that I—” Mikasa spoke breathlessly, as if there were a speed in her mind she couldn’t catch up to, as if the black wind that wailed through the forest were threshing through the leaves and branches of her own thoughts. Mikasa’s hands were lifted awkwardly above her chest.

“Of course, she could see in his face the two different people,” Kruger said. “Or maybe it was three or more because Eren and the deer-head had the same eyes, that dead omniscient taxidermy reflection of too many faces. It was like a hundred paints mixed together to make that black color of total light absorption. The fish that had surfaced in his eyes wasn’t the one that had sank earlier. Countless shadows in that murky brown lake all lurked without any shape or identity, and his expression couldn’t be unraveled to expose any singular expression. It was only the all-seeing embalmment.”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” the woman said. “You surfaced and seized the reins and it was all because you wanted to be the one to use Eren Jaeger’s cock in that particular engagement. You weren’t the one who saved her, but you felt the desire and jealousy of him, and so you shouldered him back down under the consciousness because Eren Jaeger was too preoccupied by the nightmare to do anything about the girl lying under him and so willing too, and once he was out of the way, it was just you and the woman you’d never met and whom he wanted to protect from the moment he laid eyes on her orphaned objectified dehumanized little-girl body.”

“No.” Eren Kruger looked at her. “There is no we, us, them, he, or any other dimension of pronoun. It’s just a shapeless identityless I,” he said. “The sinking and surfacing fish aren’t the antiquated individualities. They’re the lake itself.”

Eren took Mikasa’s wrists where they were lifted awkwardly, holding the wrists close together. With all those parts and screws, put together to do what the governing hand bided, Mikasa lied under him, her mind churning with windlike speed. Then, though it wasn’t that they had changed positions, their positions were suddenly changed. The walls of the cabin had shifted, rearranging how they were: Now she was on top, her knees squeezing his ribs, sitting hot and pantiless on his belly.

With her head hanging, shoulders shrugged up around her ears, Mikasa bore an image that was like both abashment and grief all at once, hair everywhere in her face, palms flattened on his chest, her thighs and calves corded with tension. A swallow heaved, huge and dry, audible, in Mikasa’s throat.

“Are you okay?” Eren said. He saw teeth slashing across her face. Eren said: “We could . . . . . .”

“_No_.”

Eren’s pulse kicked up. He began to blush too, “O-oh,” and appeared just as abashed as she did. His eyes took on a reflective quality like two round dollops of scorched glass. The irises seemed to slowly swirl with energy and a fresh almost youthful curiosity, which he hadn’t felt and never could feel except in a place out of time, out of reality inside a strange place of untenability.

Reaching both hands behind his head, Eren clasped his fingers together. He said: “It’s all up to you, Mikasa,” his voice low and indicative. “You’re not a selfish person in my opinion. But if you want to choose to be, that’d be okay.”

Mikasa’s entire body was shimmering, blood pooling in her face, black hair falling everywhere in her view. “Close your eyes, Eren,” she said. “Please.”

Eren looked at her blushing on top of him. Together they were glowing like two embarrassed schoolchildren who’d finally mustered up enough courage to profess their mutual infatuations for each other, reaching out shyly, about to hold hands. Like that, but only symbolically, since they were adults, and Eren’s linen shorts were nowhere to be found and he felt Mikasa on top of him, aroused, in her dominant-positioned straddle.

Eren leaned his head back. He let his eyes close.

The wayward shapes of wayward flames lapped the inside of his eyelids. Gradually his face began to undo itself. Softening, dissolving. A moment, his expression was that of a sleeping expression, undisturbed and serene. Then pricks of pinpoints twitched the facial muscles like he was remembering spasmodically something distressing, memories coming at him one at a time, though his mind was a white blank. His mouth dropped opened for oxygen. His fingers clasped with more insistence behind his head. His biceps inflated like the arms wanted to move, but Eren wasn’t letting them go anywhere. Now it was less of him cradling his head, and more of him restraining his fingers with his neck.

The back of Eren’s eyelids disappeared and a thousand miles of darkness surged up and covered him. A constellation of lights floated and spun and he grew weaker at each celestial point. Holding his breath, he saw the lights spin faster. Then everything began to fall and sway and he about swung into the descent of a peaceful nothingness before his eyes flew open.

Moving now without grief, without self-consciousness either, Mikasa was about to grind him past the point of no return. With her hands on the floor, eyes slammed shut, Mikasa rode him powerfully and robustly, with all that one-hundred soldier grit, tenacity, and intensity. A climax bubbled up like a geyser heated by a molten conspiracy of temperature and pressure, rising all the way up from the deepest heart of the earth, the deepest heart of her cervix. Noises emerged from Eren in falsetto. Not laughter this time. An outpouring of loss and remorse did not repeat itself here. Mikasa wasn’t doing an extraction. Nor was Eren letting himself be extracted. He tried to resist the irresistible, not yet, not yet, “Ah-ahh—” That’s when Eren’s hands took over. They jerked out from under his head and tore beneath the man’s shirt.

Mikasa went wide-eyed before he rolled them over onto her back, not even pausing their motion, their muscles crashing together like the muscular bodies of two strong stallions. She had a hard stomach like his, their abdomens clapping when they slammed against each other.

No sounds did she make. No audible signs. She merely breathed, the only sign, and covered her face with her hands and wrists, still abashed, still in grief. Her knees, weakened by a soft humming shaky sensation, were bent at ninety degrees in the air. Without raising her head, her chin tucked, Mikasa watched between her hands where her legs were open: It was her own naked body, and Eren, and Eren, and Eren again. Mikasa was burning, not from the fire that blazed nearby but from the living fire, the whites of her upper eyes showing with how they had scrolled down to watch the act, astonished by the way Eren stretched the door and manned his way deeper. She’d almost forgotten he was a lot less boy now, and a lot more man.

In every modulation, every syncopation possible, Mikasa desired Eren in all the possible ways a person could possibly desire: inside, outside, sidewise, lateral— Eren’s fingers buried in her waist, finding purchase there, he furled his hips strongly, and it was no easy feat, she could see the strife in his veins and in the complexion of his throat, his thighs colliding with her thighs with sound . . . and something was struck like the piano’s high note, no flat, no sharp, just high, high, and ivory—Mikasa’s introversion finally shattered, a soprano was singing———; For Eren and Eren alone Mikasa’s body opened like a wet livid flower.

Mikasa’s eyes grew damp. Her hands clutched at the swells of his arms. Then they clung to his face. Between his lips slid a couple fingers and his jaws opened and went dead. Savagely affectionate restraint tamed the caprice and menace of his bite. Through an enormous concentration of will, Eren let her fondle the fangs tasked with unbridling the titan, the monster, the atrocity. Her investigative pads groped around his tongue, the fragile rope of his frenulum, saliva pooling under and around her fingers, dribbling warm down her palm, cooling on her wrist. Almost to the extent of exhaustion, Eren was restrained.

With her fingers still in his mouth, a faint cry emerged in the back of Mikasa’s throat. Mounting like it had begun from far away and was coming closer, it rose in pitch with an illusory quality of speed and acceleration, they were indeed going faster, eloquent in a dark wordless diction of tension too much to bear. Mikasa’s hands came away from his face and flung over her head.

Without thinking it in words, only hearing the forms and prolonged vowels of their heat as they both began to cry, Eren knew he could do it this time because he goddamned wanted to, and ducked his head against Mikasa’s neck, inhaling, pulling in the pheromones steaming from her skin into the very bottom of his lungs, pushing hair away, off her face, grunting, maybe groaning, something like that. He opened his lips on her upturned neck to lick the salt boiling from her throat. Then he kissed her. Hard. Her lips rubbed away the clinging brine of her own perspiration and come.

The large man’s shirt that hadn’t been removed—it had only been suspect of being removed—Eren finally wrenched away, and it came off, torn straight from her chest or jerked over her head or altogether dematerialized, he didn’t know how it was removed, it might’ve been the doing of some dreamwork, the shirt delaying and denying a piece of her from a piece of him, and in the spirit or theme of unreality and dreamwork, the shirt became nothing but time insinuated between the caress of his palms and the trembling rising-and-falling swells of her breasts, which lay flattened low and somehow elusive to hold. It was time too much, an agonizing fragment of a minute, a tormenting split of a second, an excruciating endlessness of endlessness, he may never get to touch her at all.

At last he sat the heel of his hand on her breastbone. Sweat and pulse-tempo ignited under his palm.

Pressing her down, Eren drew a vestige of strength from the contracting muscles of his groin to give her all he had left, moving through Mikasa, with Mikasa, against Mikasa, flooding Mikasa with all the whimsical dreamy descriptions and details of sex.

“Of _fucking_,” the woman said.

“What?” Kruger said.

“That’s what you meant to say.”

“Sure, that too.” Kruger went on—

Mikasa’s face darkened. Her eyes welled. She stared wide and blind through a layer of dew as if she were looking up at Eren from under an oceanic reverie, going in and out of focus, her lips gaping, protruded around a hollow shaft of air. He felt himself boiling now, regressed into an agonizing engorged thing, irrepressibly and fulsomely erect, swallowed inside the in-drawing grasp of her folds. “_animal_—” the woman was moaning now, but it was for Kruger, and for Kruger’s tumescent veteran-cock, “oh GOD”— A kind of mournful desperation entered Eren’s breathing, and then for the very last time he—

“Even though he hadn’t acquired the power yet,” Kruger said, “it was the cabin which did not obey the universe’s laws, it was that quality of untenability I told you about, so the pathways liquefied the linearity of events so that chronology didn’t stack up from beginning to end. It was fluid, but it wasn’t a stream. It was a retention pond where everything gathered and collected into one heterogeneous body. So even though Eren Jaeger had not acquired such power yet according to the chronology, the power of the war hammer began to rise from out of him and crystallize to encompass them in an eternal structure, to immortalize them as they were, preserved in a terrible exaltation. The white of her eyes which had once been showing in astonishment now gave way to fear, but she couldn’t inhibit the power coming out of him. She couldn’t resist either. She couldn’t even think about wanting to resist as it became harder and harder to move, steam filling the cabin, making it harder and harder to see, the titan exoskeleton growing over their two bodies, fusing them and freezing them with how they were tensed together, gripping each other at the climax.

“Then she began to realize that it wasn’t the war hammer’s tentacles restraining her. It was her own body and nature revoking all movement ability. Cursed from the moment she’d been born, it was likely she hadn’t even been born alive, she began to revert against her consent, becoming unalive like she’d been at the moment of conception. Her head lied back in resignation and the insentient attachment of her eyes pointed their sightless view at the ceiling, unwillful and artificial with long artificial eyelashes, and the cracks of where the parts of her doll-body had been lovingly placed together reappeared as she retrograded into the primitive inanimate state, turning back into wood, beginning to shine with that lustrous chemical patina. A mere ball-and-joint doll assembled to be manipulated and posed.”

With his head bent, still on top of her, Eren tried to call Mikasa back into the world. He grasped the unpliant shape of her breasts, using his tongue to stimulate the stiff nub of the extraneously detailed rendering. He wondered why the extraneity when she was only made of wood, not even a living woman, and for what purpose when she would be in a constant state forever. But he knew it was because the craftsman had not only loved Mikasa but had desired her as if she had been built out of actual hot female flesh, and what the craftsman had wanted was nearly the same as what Eren had wanted. Only what Eren had wanted resided underneath. What Eren had wanted was the memory existing on the inside. But neither man would get what they had wanted because when the flesh ceased to be, the Remembering became un-anything because without the flesh the memory could no longer resurrect what it had sworn to Remember.

The doll was unreceptive.

Eren put away his tongue and brandished his teeth, which carried all the devastation and rage of a monster that could demolish calcified bone to powder and tear away pounds and pounds of meat. Then he tore and demolished. Crescents scarred and mutilated the wood. All over, Eren tried to hurt her, tried to pull blood out of the fictitious veins, trying to make her scream and hold onto the hurt, to return back alive by remembering it, coming again into the feeling of injury and suffering, opening gashes all over, saying to her, _we went home together, Remember? you said you were cold, but you felt warm in my scarf, Remember? i wrapped it around you and i told you i’d wrap it around you as many times as you wanted, Remember? forever even, Remember that? don’t you Remember? mikasa? mikasa?—_

She was unreceptive. She was not even flesh. Nothing. Un-anything.

Up along his neck vertebrae sprouted crystallizing titan skin. Then he couldn’t move anymore. On top of the doll, he finally relinquished. Lying naked against the thing that had once been the girl, the childhood friend, the existing Remembering, Eren closed his eyes and got ready to turn off the living without doing any of the dying.

“The cocoon of titan skin finished at last, preserving them there in that cabin for the rest of eternity,” Kruger said.

“What?” the woman said. “Is that all?”

“Yes,” Kruger said. “That’s all.”

The fire had gone out. Kruger had let it go out once they were done. Now a table-lamp shed a frugal scope of dirty light. Sitting up in the bed, the sheets still wet with sex, warm from their bodies, Kruger drank whiskey from a crystal glass. The woman was cleaning herself out with a douche.

“Aren’t you going to sleep any?” she said, not turning to look at him.

“No, thank you. I’m going to have this drink.”

“Well I listened to your story,” she said. “It wasn’t a love story, and despite the unromance, I didn’t much like it. It was a nightmare replaced by a nightmare replaced by a nightmare. First the drowning, then the delivery, then the rape, which seems backward until you realize the events don’t follow sequential logic, but they follow the non-sequential logic of terror, and then finally the unanimation; or less figuratively, the dissolution of freewill. Where is the ending?”

“The only way to end one nightmare is by creating a greater one.”

The woman didn’t dress. She put on a coat of lipstick and went to a wood drawer chest and opened a small intimate compartment that confined her silk panties and esoteric ladies’ garments. She pulled out a cigarette holder and a cigarette and a light. She jointed the holder’s pieces together and pinched it between her violet lips and then asked Kruger to light the cigarette for her, which he did. The blue smoke rose lazily and smuttily in front of her face. Kruger watched from the bed, drinking in the low light. She joined him and turned on her side.

“So here’s the thing, I know you’re a sad crazy man and all, and I don’t actually dislike sad crazy men, and I don’t actually dislike your storytelling. But here’s the thing, I charge more for listening.” She told him the price. “I think that’s fair since I listened well enough and obligingly. I didn’t even complain that there was no after-the-fact of the apotheosis. All Eren Jaeger did was hold his breath, trying to defy the passage of time and sorrow and ended up near killing himself with excruciating un-relief, unable to liberate all that pressure, without even building up stimulation with the girl, but cramping himself with hatred. Not hatred toward her, of course. He could never hate her. He hated himself because when he had saved her, the saving inadvertently activated the underlying genetic curse which unanimated the selfhood and began the dissolution of freedom, making her into his greatest personal nightmare. And he was the cause of it.”

(And, the woman added, if the doll were not enough and we were to expand the metaphor with a more graphic and colorful illustration: Imagine indissoluble steel wires nailed into Mikasa’s puppet limbs at one end, nailed to Eren Jaeger’s Puppet Master fingers at the other. And the puppet limbs could move only in response and answer to the motion and volition of the Puppet Master’s fingers, able to contract mobility in no other capacity or mode. Of course, Eren Jaeger resented this, not her, but the steel wires. And he thought of chopping the hands off at the wrist. But this was too merciful. He loathed himself so sensually that he must sever each finger with a scalpel and marinate in each minute of suffering for what he’d caused. It was an accident, of course. But judgment was uninterested in true intentions.

Therefore he laughed like he did when he was too hysterical with pain to cry or sob and held out his mutilated hands in a perpetual unanswerable question of Why was I even born?, but the world doesn’t make errors when bringing people into it and at which moment in time, and there was indeed a reason for his being alive, though he may not like it; he’d been divinely purposed to become the greatest evil to ever exist in the world, to be remembered and hated for all of history while the royal half-brother was tasked to become the world’s martyred savior, to be worshipped like a god for the rest of all-time; and as Eren Jaeger did this, the laughing, the outspread hands perpetually questioning, blood shrieked from his fingerless knuckles, painting the white sand with three feet of blood. Laughing because he was also a deranged lunatic, and it wasn’t the pathways or the memories that progressed the insanity, it was a patient undoing brought on by a repetition, the repeated self-mutilation, the self-cannibalism? of his own choice, was it a choice?

And the girl, Mikasa, liberated of the indissoluble steel wires now that the Puppet Master’s fingers had been removed, watched, seeing him for the lunatic he’d become as the laughing of hysterical pain mounted, his head thrown back, rising to an unspeakable roar, and she loved him anyway, and it took a monstrous woman indeed to love the greatest evil to ever exist in the world.

Then the blood shrieking from his knuckles began to congeal and coalesce and take form like a string and it wrapped, warm and throbbing, around her neck in a red scarf, sweet to the taste, which she had taken off, weeks earlier, months earlier, she wasn’t sure, and which he was now wrapping her up in again like he said he would all those ages ago, his hands outspread, still laughing, still questioning, Why was I even—; tenderly enveloping her while he himself was fingerless, beyond that now, dismembered, the elbows divided from the wrists, the knees divorced from the thighs, and lastly the head parted from the shoulders.

Eren’s voice dropped, and the echoes of the pealing laughter made its sudden absence strong and big and loud, and Mikasa had to make her ears hear him, they were still resonating with roars of laughter, the reverbs still twanging down the coils of her cochlea, the ear drums flexing at a sharp quietness. Eren was speaking very quiet, calm even, not like a lunatic, though the quick-fire modulation made him even more of a lunatic as he looked at her eyes, sighing a hot exhaust of relief, saying, _It’s okay, Mikasa, You’re free now,_ breathless with deliverance, a fantasy absolution. Almost like he would’ve done if they’d ever had enough time to love and to finish only to love again another day.

Now that the blood had finally run out, the scarf singing warm around Mikasa’s neck, flying soft and gentle behind her shoulder, the slices of his anatomy began to buckle and shift out from under each other because it was merely inertia and habit which had held him in an illusory homogenous form, but now gravity took hold, so the meat and body segments crumpled and spattered across the shore (they were on a beach, the woman said, though location is hardly relevant, is it?), thudding dully into the sand.

Naturally the girl, Mikasa, fell to her knees. She didn’t scream. She hadn’t even meant to scream. She was unable to speak at all and could only look at Eren and transmit a stream of thoughts to his dying brain, telling him with her mind that he hadn’t needed to free her if it meant he had to die; that she would’ve foregone freedom if it meant he could live. And this so-called curse wasn’t much of a curse because her heart matched what it dictated her to do. It never had to make her do anything because she was already going to do it anyway.

But of course he had decided on his own that he needed to free her and of course he knew he had to die for it. A nonnegotiable price. _I’m sorry__,_ he would’ve transmitted back, if the vital cables and hardware of his vertebrae hadn’t been cut. He would’ve thought it, if his brain had had enough electricity left to fire it off. Maybe it did. Just barely sputtered it through the neurons, the very last flicker of intellect, before the illumination in his eye spiraled down into a black staircase like it was being sucked down a drain until no daylight was on anymore. Finally, finally it was over.

Mikasa brushed Eren Jaeger’s hair tenderly away. She might’ve even leant down to kiss his forehead too. She might’ve also said ‘Thank you,’ but by then, he would’ve already been gone. Whatever she did or didn’t do, it’s an ambiguous conclusion, I know, but a hand most certainly did reach out and take Mikasa’s fingers in a vain pitiful effort of consolation. _I understand how you feel,_ a good friend Sasha told her. And Mikasa, inconsolable, said: _You’ll never understand how I feel._ The absence of pathos in the bereaved girl’s voice was startling, though no one was around to hear it and be startled. Then she added: _You’re dead, Sasha. _And Sasha said, _Oh, yeah, that’s right. _

This depiction would’ve interposed the explanation of the first story had the woman gone on to illustrate the symbolism further. But she hadn’t. She was still explaining the ending of the first story without intermission.)

“That’s why Eren Jaeger had to freeze them forever,” she went on, uninterrupted, “to stave off the nightmare’s ultimate culmination, to postpone the eternity of enslavement. But he was too late to do any good. He owned both her mind and body when he had only wanted for her to choose and to act by her own independence. That’s when he thought up the idea that all he had to do was freeze them both so they neither had to die nor acquiesce to Fate’s hand. It wasn’t a life-saving sanctuary, but a sojourn of their own destruction and sorrow. But during the attempt to suspend time, she slipped through his teeth and turned back into a doll and thus he failed to do any good at all to save the girl he was, as a matter of fact, in love with. Not an abstraction anymore.”

“You’re a shrewd woman,” Kruger said.

“I’m a good listener,” she said. “I’m just disinclined to do it often because there aren’t very many good talkers. And men aren’t a species of good talkers anyway. Although, Mr. Kruger, you’re a little different, you might even be special. I suppose a man’s got to be a little crazy to be very interesting and he’s got to be a little special to be any good at talking.”

Kruger finished his drink and set the glass on the bedside stand. Then he came off the bed and put on his clothes. He dressed in Marleyian army fatigues. Then he fished his wallet out of his pocket.

“How would you end the story, then?” he said. “I would like to listen to your version of the end of the end.”

The woman smoked on the bed, lying on her side, and deliberated. A feline arch cinched in her waist. Ash pattered the carpeted floor where she’d tapped it off. She drew in a lungful, deliberating some more. Wisps of blue smoke curlicued from her violet lips; two chutes shot out in the shape of her nostrils. When the holder bumped her front teeth, it made a sound like porcelain. At last she began to narrate:

“The end begins with the abstraction,” she said. “Eren Jaeger only loved dead people; that’s why he spent most of his life racing into the throes of war and battle, chasing after his precious ghosts. He loved his mother and he loved his father, and he loved the girl who had died when she was only nine years old. All girls die when they turn fifteen. But this girl had died seven years too early, and so it wasn’t the death that made her so unfortunate; it was the prematurity. Eren Jaeger had killed her by accident. And he didn’t even know she was dead until they told him she had died and it was his doing.

“In retrospect the deadness became apparent on her wooden lost-girl face. Everything made sense then, nothing made sense then, yet it did. There had to be a way to emancipate her from death, is what Eren Jaeger thought. But this isn’t about Eren Jaeger. This isn’t Eren Jaeger’s story at all. Love stories are never about the one who must die, and Eren Jaeger must unalterably die in every ending. Love stories are about the one who must survive.”

In this version, there was no war hammer power and no sojourn. There was the cabin, the hearth, and the deer-head mount; they were back to where they’d left off. Mikasa was under Eren again, but their body temperatures had already cooled, their blood had already grown quiet. Maybe they hadn’t done anything yet except take off their clothes and get on the floor. Maybe they went back in time too far. Maybe none of this was happening at all.

The scar beneath Mikasa’s eye was dark and reminiscent, and she held Eren’s face in her hands and held him in her view. It was meaningful to be pulled into perspective, to be not just looked at, but to be cradled in a kaleidoscopic gaze of all the gentle and tender persuasions a person could communicate through eye contact. Then holding his face without force or selfishness, Mikasa kissed him softly. Eren’s eyes closed without him having to make them close; they simply let go.

“To bear living in this world, people must find a reason to keep moving forward,” Mikasa said. “Hanji was the one who told me that.”

Eren’s fingers silenced her lips. “Wait.”

She removed his hand. “Eren, please listen to what I have to say.” Her eyes took him in and saw Eren and saw everything through Eren like a mirror. “It’s for a beautiful reason that I exist,” she told him at last, her voice very gentle, “and continue enduring this nightmare.”

He winced as if his heart muscle had rolled out of a gaping wound in his chest and without tearing their eyes away from each other, they both ignored the splatter and _lub-dub_ of the ventricles, still alive, still wetly palpitating on the floor. Of course, this didn’t happen. It was only a metaphor.

“It’s okay,” Mikasa said, and put her palm over the nonexistent metaphorical chest wound. “I know you’re afraid of pain. You’ve always been afraid of it, even though you stick your hand into flames pointlessly and don’t make a sound. I know you’re afraid, even if you’ll sever your own limbs without it being necessary to your objective.”

Eren went still with the remembering of what was going to happen weeks from then, months maybe, thinking there was no way she could know that or remember it from the future. (Sweating and blowing breath through flared nostrils, he swung the ax down on his sad defenseless leg, chomping down on thick leather, unoccupied Marleyian fatigues set aside like the pelt of a ghost or the outline of a dead man)

“Will you let me look at you,” Mikasa said, “for a little bit longer?” She held his face very softly in her hands and Eren shut his eyes and with dilated attentive pupils, she drank in the cruel beauty of a caring unforgiving irredeemable man turned monster, believing he was the most beautiful reason a person could keep. And maybe she thought this way because she was an assembly of insentient parts and screws. Then again, maybe not.

(Mikasa thought about how Eren was going to leave, thinking about the fire of the burning city as the world began to burn, the flames roaring up and smoke swirling like sad dreamwork. This wouldn’t happen for some time, though. Then her memory retraced its steps and she remembered the time before that. Now she was remembering when Eren was gone, before the city had burned, back at home where she’d been left behind. Here, there was a forest. The air hung empty and forlorn. Sasha’s arrow bulged from a male deer’s throat. In the forest’s silence, Mikasa knelt beside the dying creature.

“Venison,” Sasha moaned. “We’ll enjoy your meat fully, Mr. Deer. You can die in peace now.”

Mikasa leaned close. The creature’s eye was glazed, a little red and scared with its growing death. Its nostrils flared. Warm failing breath blew from its snout. Mikasa swept her fingers across its face and touched where the antlers began. They pulsated with heat and thrumming nerves. Pink mammal blood stained its lips. It was suffering, scared, through the final moments, staring at her.

Mikasa said: “Eren?” Then the intelligence fled from its eye and Mikasa felt it leaving and then it was gone.

“Hey,” Sasha said. Sasha’s hair had been cut short. She kneeled beside Mikasa, putting down the hunting bow. “Are you tearing up from happiness that we’ve found this beautiful meat?” She cupped Mikasa’s hand sympathetically. “I understand how you feel.”

Mikasa said nothing.

The dead eye stared outward with an insentient omniscience and Mikasa’s reflection hung on its cornea, a bright vague face looking back at a world flattened and scorched and finally free; it saw and she saw and an eternity passed. The lid hadn’t had enough life left to shut, staring permanently at the last sight of what had been done, the eyelashes seeming to catch fire as thunderous flames, taller than a mountainous pile of all the corpses of lost soldiers and patriots and children in all the wars and massacres ever waged or perpetrated, shifted and translated light upon itself.

In Mikasa’s chest the heart valves opened and closed, opened and closed. Eternally.)

Morning came with a few chirruping birds and a raw purposeless air. Sunlight gleamed. The cabin’s windows scintillated blue dawn. Inside, the house was unlived in, the hearth unused.

In the early minutes of tomorrow, Kruger left a bedroom, dressed in the Marleyian uniform. The woman put cash in her corset and left soon after. Kruger went to work with a military cap jammed over his eyes. And she went to work with her gold hair tied up so that a nameless man could let it down and bask in its shine. Here’s the truth if the truth is what should be believed: The door Eren Kruger had closed and the door the woman had subsequently opened were not the same door. This woman left an altogether different building where she’d been with an altogether different man. He wasn’t military. And he most certainly wasn’t sad or crazy or even a little bit special. She had never met a Mr. Eren Kruger. And most of all, she had never listened to the telling of a story of a doll and a deer, and a girl and a boy, and the symbolic night that never could’ve happened in the implausible untenable interior of an unlived-in cabin.

Whatever is truth or not, history and reality are never central to this world, somehow somewhere in a winterized forest, a savage wind might have been wailing through the trees, crashing with speed and power like a collusion of all the terror and lost love two enduring soldiers might feel manifested into an invisible unrelenting creaturely mass that could roar into a meaningless black, forever. There it was December. And Eren was falling.

* * *

# Reading Guide

If you're a reader who might possibly be interested in a kind of "sparknotes" explanation on what you just read, here's my best shot at that.

If you're a writer and you're curious about another writer's process, here's that too.

First of all, I'm an English Literature major, and I love literary theory, and I enjoy deconstructing text. So what I read almost always leaks into my process.

I read _House of Leaves, Slaughterhouse-Five, In Our Time,_ and _Good Omens_ during the span of writing this fic. _Good Omens_ was fluffy and fun. The others were a little trickier. Both _House of Leaves_ and _Slaughterhouse-Five_ play with narrative and time, so that's where my mind was at.

The beginning of this fic starts out simple. Mikasa saves Eren, Eren saves Mikasa, they find a cabin in the woods and hunker down for the night.

**Untenable:** 1\. incapable of being defended, as an argument, thesis, etc.; indefensible. 2. not fit to be occupied, as an apartment, house, etc.

SYNONYMS FOR **untenable**

1 baseless, groundless, unsound, weak, questionable.

The cabin isn't deteriorated or inhospitable, but it's isolated and untenable.

The idea was this: Everything that happens in the story takes place in the cabin. Even if it happens in the forest or the whorehouse, it's actually unfolding in the cabin. The cabin is supposed to be a "space outside of space." It is a timeless, dimensionless, undefined container and breeding ground in which abstractions of various forms (nightmares, fantasies, illusions, symbols, metaphors) can germinate and thrive.

**ab·strac·tion **/abˈstrakSH(ə)n/

_noun_

1\. something which exists only as an idea.

The cabin acts like a greenhouse for abstractions. Therefore, concrete people can't be in it. Only the idea of people can be in it. The cabin is a groundless, unsound, illogical no-place. And inside the cabin, abstractions can play out infinitely.

Here are some of the "abstractions" that grow in the cabin:

**The deer head: a symbol. **Animal mounts are creepy in general. And I was going for a creepy-ish tone. But anyway, in context, the deer head is a symbol of Eren. Mikasa keeps either confusing anything deerlike for Eren, or she sees Eren with weird likenesses to the deer head. I chose the deer mount because an animal mount is just a trophy of the hunt. Right? Meaning, the animal is prey. In German, _Jäger_, _Jager_, or _Jaeger_ means hunter. So really Eren should've been the OPPOSITE of the deer mount. But he's not. He's defined and represented by his name as being the hunter, yet that's not fully correct. He's a paradox. I see Eren as both prey and hunter in canon. He's trying to kill his enemies while his enemies are simultaneously trying to kill him and it's just kill, kill, kill (to use Armin's words). The only thing that separates a hunter from prey is that the prey loses. And Eren, I predict, will die at the very end of the manga.

**The wooden doll: a symbol.** The wood doll is an incarnation of the Ackerman curse. The story is told in an escalation of nightmares. So the beginning is nightmarish but its not traumatically nightmarish. The end where Mikasa turns into an insentient wooden doll is the worst nightmare Eren could possibly conceive—and likewise, this means the Ackerman curse is his ultimate nightmare. He swore to protect Mikasa, to save Mikasa, but he's actually just the villain caging her, keeping her from being free. And the suckiness of that is twofold since he's in love with her in this fic.

**Eren Kruger:** **the embodiment of a storyteller/author. **Originally everything took place in Kruger's mind. An EreMika romance went down in the cabin and then Eren's brain split suddenly, and then it was actually just Kruger having a dream in Marley, and so everything that happened in the story was just Kruger having a dream. But I decided to change it and make the cabin "space outside of space" or whatever. So then Kruger became the idea who invented the idea of Eren and Mikasa being in the cabin. An idea begets more ideas, kind of thing. In this way, Kruger becomes the conceptual "author" of the EreMika love story. So his function as a character embodies me, the writer.

**The Woman: the embodiment of a listener/reader.** Like a reader, she listens and helps expand on the story of Eren and Mikasa. She analyzes their story and even puts her own spin to it. She is the conceptual "reader" of the love story. The purpose of her character embodies what you do as a reader, except since I don't know what your thoughts are, a lot of the time she analyzes Eren, Mikasa, Historia, and Kruger in the way that I would analyze them. Most of her analyses derive from my own theories and interpretations as a fellow reader of SNK. She also functions as the transition between linear narrative and unreliable narrative. She comes in the moment at which Eren's mind splits, and thus the story splits. Furthermore, she becomes the transition from platonic EreMika to romantic EreMika. I decided to use a prostitute because she's kinda like a vehicle of intimacy—and so she's able to naturally shift Eren into that mindspace.

Ok, there's probably more I could say, but imma keep it short. Sorry if this came off pretentious or self-promoting or something. Most of the time, I figure fanfiction readers wouldn't want to read this kind of text. But idk, maybe they would.

Thanks for reading.


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